Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Everything is pretend:
• The White House transcript version of one of several Mike Pence lines in Munich that was greeted by utter silence: See video here. (The boldface below is mine.)
We’re grateful for Senator Graham’s leadership of this delegation and grateful for the strong bipartisan American presence represented here. To them and to all of you, it’s my great honor to speak to you today, on behalf of a champion of freedom and a champion of a strong national defense, the 45th President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump. (Applause.)
• Spring rains in the Arctic could double methane emissions: A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is worrying since it’s expected that these rains will increase because of climate change, speeding up the thawing of the permafrost. And that could mean more emissions of methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but much shorter-lived in the atmosphere. Said the study's lead author Rebecca Neumann, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington: "Our results emphasize that these permafrost regions are sensitive to the thermal effects of rain, and because we're anticipating that these environments are going to get wetter in the future, we could be seeing increases in methane emissions that we weren't expecting,"
• One of the only two original American Indian Movement founders still alive has stage 4 prostate cancer: Clyde Bellecourt—who with Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, Herb Powless, Eddeh Benton Banai, Francis Fairbanks, and “Girlie” Brown founded the organization in Minnesota in 1968—continued with the organization for decades through splits and scrutiny by the FBI that included infiltration by agents. Besides Bellecourt, only Banai remains alive.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Steven Cook at Foreign Policy says All This Should Remind You of the Run-Up to the Iraq War: The march to war against Iran is echoing the drumbeats of America's last major Middle Eastern invasion:
The chatter about Iran has not become the war fever that gripped Washington in 2002 over Iraq, but the echoes of that year are not hard to miss in the Trump administration’s effort to shape the domestic and international debate about Iran. No one has made a reference to smoking guns and mushroom clouds, but how far off are we when the most senior U.S. officials have essentially declared their Iranian counterparts to be little more than a murderous gang hellbent on dominating the region? This was the same message that the George W. Bush administration stressed over and over again about Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
• Trump regime officials backing People’s Mujahedin to overthrow Iranian government:
Members of the Trump administration have been providing support to a political sect that aims to topple the Iranian regime in Tehran. Around 2,000 of its members live in a camp in Albania. Former members say it is subjecting followers to torture and psychological terror.
On a country road in northwestern Albania, a rather odd collection of men and women living together in a camp are busy preparing themselves to topple the Iranian regime. Three times per week, many of them apparently practice slitting throats, breaking hands, jabbing out eyeballs with fingers and performing the so-called Glasgow Smile, which involves cutting cheeks from the corner of the mouth up toward the ear. That, at least, is the story told by a former member of the group.
• Toledo residents want personhood status for Lake Erie:
Called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, it would grant personhood status to the lake, with the citizens being the guardians of the body of water. If passed, citizens could sue a polluter on behalf of the lake, and if the court finds the polluter guilty, the judge could impose penalties in the form of designated clean-ups and/or prevention programs.
• Oh goodie:
A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public.
OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its "chameleon-like" language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in a scaled-down version, due to "concerns about malicious applications of the technology".
That's because the computer model, which generates original paragraphs of text based on what it is given to 'read', is a little too good at its job.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
Sanders in, pie fights on. McConnell, Chao & a hmm emoji. Stone gets into yet more trouble. Trump judges' bizarre problems with Brown. Gaslighting separated families. The hedge fund that loves to hate newspapers. Surprised by Trump’s tax flop? How?